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During a Dell earnings call, the company mentioned some staggering numbers regarding the amount of PCs that will not or cannot be upgraded to Windows 11.
"We have about 500 million of them capable of running Windows 11 that haven't been upgraded," said Dell COO Jeffrey Clarke on a Q3 earnings call earlier this week, referring to the overall PC market, not just Dell's slice of machines. "And we have another 500 million that are four years old that can't run Windows 11." He sees this as an opportunity to guide customers towards the latest Windows 11 machines and AI PCs, but warns that the PC market is going to be relatively flat next year.
↫ Tom Warren at The Verge
The monumental scale of the Windows 10 install base that simply won't or cannot upgrade to Windows 11 is massive, and it's absolutely bonkers to me that we're mostly just letting them get away with leaving at least a billion users out in the cold when it comes to security updates and bug fixes. The US government (in better times) and the EU should've 100% forced Microsoft's hand, as leaving this many people on outdated, unsupported operating system installations is several disasters waiting to happen.
Aside from the dangerous position Microsoft is forcing its Windows 10 users into, there's also the massive environmental and public health impact of huge swaths of machines, especially in enterprise environments, becoming obsolete overnight. Many of these will end up in landfills, often shipped to third-world countries so we in the west don't have to deal with our e-waste and its dangerous consequences directly. I can get fined for littering – rightfully so – but when a company like Microsoft makes sweeping decisions which cause untold amounts of dangerous chemicals to be dumped in countless locations all over the globe, governments shrug it off and move on.
At least we will get some cheap eBay hardware out of it, I guess.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday December 03 2025, @08:46PM (3 children)
And why should MS be required to support years-old, end-of-life'd software, for which they announced the end-of-life date ten years ago?
Well, quite. If the customer isn't willing to pay... Microsoft is not a charity.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 03 2025, @09:03PM
:-) The comment above yours should make it clear that compulsory licensing would make the problem go away. The software would be forced open for third party support and distribution, and Microsoft can collect royalties. All perfectly fair. Screw them if they don't like it. Copyrights/patents should have a price, call it a "property tax" if you like
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aafcac on Thursday December 04 2025, @07:56PM (1 child)
Then, they also shouldn't be allowed to require it to be bundled with the machines. It goes both ways, if they're going to be allowed to have it bundled, then it should be required to be supported for the life of the machine. It's not like anybody has any idea how much they're paying for the copy of Windows that comes with their computer or necessarily have a viable choice. IIRC, they were issueing refunds of like $30 at one point for people that rejected the terms and I'm skeptical that they're only making $30 a copy on those licenses.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 04 2025, @08:09PM
$30... times more than a billion
Not too shabby
There are a lot of people up and down the supply chain to pay off